Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

eidel.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 1001 posts

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#721

Post by alibarber »

anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #670
alibarber wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who was advised to wait 6-12 months for a tax refund in Finland (not a standard payroll/prepaid tax) [1] I'd say it's because 'the system' is still the old system from the past that hasn't entirely kept up with the fact that in this day and age: - A limited company is not always a giant manufacturing concern - An ever increasing amount of the population will not have been born in and will not be living the…

I thought those delays were meant to encourage you to declare everything in advance on your tax card.

I am talking about transfer tax on property which is completely different.

In my opinion, the tax card system effectively just moves the deadline for the tax return to Nov/December so you can ensure it's completely up to date then and not pay anything extra.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#722

Post by nforgerit »

pkos98 wrote: post #361
nforgerit wrote: post #347

German solo-founder here who just gave up this shitshow and moved to Estonia: > Estimate your revenue at 0€ for now unless you have real reason to believe otherwise (do you have paying customers lined up already? probably not). That way, you only have to pay corporate tax at the end of the year based on your actual profit (vs. having to prepay tax every quarter). This is funny. I tried to set my revenue to 0 in the b…

What "amazing things" are you referring to? I am not too familiar with the matter, only aware that self-employed people often generously use deductions and a company car to ease tax burden.

It opened up plenty of loopholes to avoid taxes and quit social systems, starting from healthcare, pensions etc. to all those little extras that allow you a tax avoiding setup which is impossible for regular employees. It also incentivizes ridiculous consumption, like the company car tax you mentioned but also to “just buy anything for 100k just to maximize cost”. It also doesn’t really incentivize RND but to wait for the next “RND tax program” any future government might be setting up. No shit that German companies are so bad with innovation (plus they’re usually lead by MBAs and lawyers who frequently have no clue).

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#723

Post by microtonal »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #437
microtonal wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bureaucracy problem is compounded by not wanting to link databases between government organizations and a general resistance to anything digital that involves personal data (except Facebook et al. for some reason), which reduces efficiency a lot . However, this is understandable given German history.

Schufa, Rundfunkbeitrag, and copyright trolls have no problem cross linking personal data between government databases in Germany. > However, this is understandable given German history. So tired of this apologetics, modern German bureaucracy has been built exactly by former Nazis and Stasi agents.

So tired of this apologetics,

Sorry, I didn't mean it as an apology, it's more that I understand the historical context (at least that's what several Germans have told me).

I strongly prefer the system where I live, where I can pretty much arrange everything government-related from behind a keyboard and a universal authenticator (DigiD).

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#724

Post by ben_w »

iacvlvs wrote: post #704
mharig wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have a person number and authorities store everything centrally. A big brother nightmare for Germans. Should be a big brother nightmare for all humans. Your number is 666.

Why? There’s always a lot of hand-wringing and FUD around giving people ID numbers, but never a coherent rational argument. What makes it a big brother nightmare for all humans?

Like all automation, having a database of your population greatly increases your efficiency, without regard to whether this power is used to do good or to do evil.

There are many still alive who remember the evils done by the Stasi, when I was a child, there were many who remembered the evils done by the Gestapo; when those are your core examples of a citizen database, such thing naturally seems "big brother".

The irony is the mirror image: America seems almost* totally willing to have private databases while disliking government ones, Europe seems almost* totally willing to have government databases while disliking private ones.

* to anyone about to reply "not I": don't be blind to the "almost", I know many here will be exceptions

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#725

Post by personomas »

hnhg wrote: post #472
personomas wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that the exit tax is usually never actually collected due to double taxation agreements between countries. Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wegzugsbesteuerung#Derzeitige_...

That is an understandable but incorrect conclusion. That should be the case, especially with freedom of movement within the EU, but the German tax authorities are essentially violating those agreements (which will inevitably get challenged in the law courts, but that will take some years). As I said elsewhere, please consult an experienced tax advisor for your particular circumstances as you cannot just figure this o…

Do you have any sources? So I can do further research.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#726

Post by archi42 »

Uh, yeah, this is all horrible. Even when founding a company makes sense, it's sometimes difficult to justify - e.g. when we were buying a house I was looking at bigger buildings with multiple units, so having a estate holding company would have made sense: We're already taxed over 30% and rents could have pushed us into the highest bracket, while most of the money (rents) in the holding would have gone into financing and maintaining the building anyway.

Don't get me started on founding a company and then getting necessary loans (all while the loan market changes and suitable houses might vanish from the market). Some proper investor is probably now renting out a multi unit house we would have bought, making nice profits while we would have aimed at boosting our pension in a few decades.

But well: That's the way it's meant to be, else the rules would be different, or would they?

(We got an old SFH instead, and slashed energy consumption by ~80-90%. That's not even accounting for PV. It's nice to profit from that now and later in life, but I still believe that we, as a society, would have benefited more from improving a MFH and sharing the lower energy consumption with some tennants)

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#727

Post by formerly_proven »

earthnail wrote: post #708
constantcrying wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a German this never really happened to me. I even own a business here, not a GmBH though. Took one document to fill out about an hour of "work". I really do not get these complaints at all. Even Taxes can be filled out easily with a pretty good online form. None of the bureaucracy ever happened to me, except it is annoying to book appointments. The only things that need addressing are the chronically understaffed…

I'm German and have a GmbH. Go found one; it's completely ridiculous. Not just founding it, but running it, too. Esp. when you know how easy it is in the US/UK/Sweden (the three other places I've lived).

Several people close to me own-operate GmbHs and it's probably the best vaccination against entrepreneurship there is.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#728

Post by ktosobcy »

treprinum wrote: post #584
usr1106 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar with both German and Finnish bureaucracy. German bureaucracy is (in)famous for paperwork and using faxes. Citizens/residents have no unique identifier (more and more weakened recently) and need to present documentation for everything. If you have no paper birth certificate you are not born... Finland has had much higher digitalization for decades. You have a person number and authorities store everythin…

I suspect the degradation came from Eastern Europe, what you wrote is what I was told EE looked like in the 80-90s.

And I thought racism wasn't a thing on HN...

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#729

Post by zettabomb »

Hrun0 wrote: post #359
zettabomb wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very good summary. There's also more Nazis in America than in Germany, and more far-right hatred in general.

Bold and utterly wrong statement

Any reason you think so or are you just not paying attention? Far-right sentiment is rising in the US by any metric.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#730

Post by aeyes »

gambiting wrote: post #640
egorfine wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically, yes. Practically, not anymore: there are block posts on main roads into Germany and they check passports.

Uhm, no - when did you try travelling last? I just crossed the border to Germany from Poland(both ways) and there is nothing there. And before that I drove over in January and there was a huge queue because of "checkpoints to combat illegal immigration" and that checkpoint was just a bunch of border guards standing there looking at cars passing by, they weren't checking passports or much of anything really, it's all…

They pull out some cars, last winter I got pulled out at the border when I entered Germany from Austria. They wanted to see our passports and asked where we were going.
Post reply on HN